A couple of weeks ago, I was reading an article from James Clear about decision fatigue and how it affects us during the day. According to some research in that article, during the day you would take better decisions when rested (for example, like when you start your day or after taking a break after lunch). Alright, there’s no need to be a scientist to know that. But one curious thing about the article is that it used the following metaphor:
Decisions are like a muscle. The more you use it, the more they get tired.
And as a muscle, you’ll need to take a rest in order to make better decisions. So, I ended up analyzing my daily choices to see if I’m suffering from decision fatigue and what I can do to avoid it.
At Work
My work day mostly consists of the following: In the morning I have two breakfasts: a small one at home and another one in my office’s cafeteria. Then I meet with the team to sync-up about our current work status and discuss which commitments we’ll be working on during the day. I do my work for a couple of hours and then it’s lunch time. We discuss where to go and what to eat and after, say 15 minutes of debate, we might go together or to different places (we mostly buy our lunches and then go back to the cafeteria). After lunch, I check my pending tasks and decide which items I’ll tackle during the afternoon. Then I close my day. Yes, nothing exiting, is it? But hell, these are the major decision points that I detected during my routine. There are exceptions and modifications during the day, but those are solved in a different way. Let’s focus on the routine.
So, how do I solve these minor decisions that add fatigue to my day? I started making a list and marked the items I could avoid with an early decision:
- Where and what to eat for lunch: I pre-order my meal the previous day. There’s a food service that allows you to choose a meal for the very next day. I pay at the end of the week, so I don’t even have to bother to pay in cash or plastic when they deliver it. And best of all, we don’t have to debate what, where or when we have to go to lunch. I know the food is just there waiting for me.
- Early meetings, early decisions: I schedule meetings at the beginning of the day or immediately after lunch. You need to be rested. My kind of meetings are those that you need to evaluate lots of choices and pick one, the right one. If you are too tired, you’ll go by the default option (see more after this).
- What’s next goes first: At the end of my day, or maybe earlier, if I managed to schedule my tasks properly, I’m able to write down a list of to-do items for tomorrow. This saves me precious decision time at our team meetings, because I already know what I’m going to do during the day. Yes, I leave room for flexibility if anything changes.
- Repetitions: Another great article from James Clear is about repetitions. There are important things that you want to do but other more-urgent-but-no-so-important topics which prevent you from doing what matters to you most. So I ended up doing some repetitions. I created a schedule, once a week I’ll meet with some friends to do some outside-the-job work with them. It doesn’t matter what we do, how we do it and how much progress we make. We just meet. Once a week. Creating a habit. And we are succeeding! Sometimes we have great output, sometimes it’s not so good, but the schedule and repetitions are the things that make us better.
Those were some of my choices. Nothing special, nothing revolutionary. Just common sense, and something that’s working for me and I wanted to share. I try to avoid menial decisions by taking them the previous day or in precise moments of the day. I create schedules and routines, so I avoid those questions “should I do this or maybe another day?”. You know the default action for those kinds of questions. But hey! Leave room for spontaneity and flexibility!
The Default Action
When you are tired, you’ll take worse decisions than when you are rested. But… Why? Because you’ll take the default action. Every decision has a fall back mechanism. What does that mean? Basically, you’ll have different paths when facing a decision, you can go with option A, or B or maybe C. But there is one choice that satisfies all the others, the most comfortable and secure of all decisions. That will be your default action.
- You have to go to the gym, but you also have to do some paperwork you need for your work at home. The question comes… Should I go to the gym? Or should I go home and work with those papers? Then the default action jumps and, if your defenses are down, it will win over you and you’ll end up at your home… watching TV.
- You are in a corporate meeting, some members of your team want to start working on a risky task but your managers don’t like the idea of losing money (or time). It’s almost 6 p.m., you want to go home and be with your family and so the default action kicks in and decides for you. “Sorry guys, the boss is right. Let’s take the safest path”. Hey, maybe the default action is right, maybe it is too risky. But you didn’t leave your brain any choice. You were too tired to give it a try and weren’t able to analyse the alternatives because you weren’t rested.
Like Judo or any other martial art, I take the default action’s strength and I use it to my advantage.
In summary, once a week I’ll meet my friends to work on a personal project. Every Tuesday, I have a default action, there’s no room for anything else. I don’t have other plans, it doesn’t matter if only 2 or 3 of the guys can meet. We meet no matter what. I pre-order my meal so I don’t have to lose time deciding what/where/when to eat, I just stay at the office’s cafeteria enjoying the delivery. My team meetings are at 10:30 a.m., I might have a late sync-up at 1:30 p.m. Those are Choices that I don’t have to make, and my decision muscle will thank me as the day goes by.
Verlic Redclaw writes about team building and motivation, and he also shares info about design, software, and freelancing. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Verlic Redclaw 